If Your Memory Is Extremely Good, This YouTuber Has A Challenge For You

Michael Humphrey
, ContributorWriting about the creators and data behind digital entertainment.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I met Nelson Dellis once before and it was hard to forget. In March of 2010, Dellis was competing in the USA Memory Championships. In fact, he was the talk of those championships after he broke a record for number memorization—reeling off 178 numbers in a row after studying a list of 500 for five minutes. Well on his way to winning his first championship, he accidentally memorized a deck of cards backwards. But that's only 20 percent of the story. The rest is that he came back to win four U.S. memory championships after that.

The combination of gift and grit that it takes to complete that story sets the 33-year-old apart.

But there's a different angle behind one of Dellis's latest adventures, the Extreme Memory Challenge, a long-term study funded by Dart Neuroscience, to examine the nature of innate memory ability.

"They're not necessarily looking for me," Dellis says. "They are looking for people who naturally have above-normal long-term memory. The idea is to get as many people as possible to take this test, to get a baseline. You are going to find outliers and the idea to is take those outliers and study them more."

The two-day test starts with viewing a combination of names and faces and then recalling the combinations. An email reminds you to take the second day test and you are compared against all participants, including Dellis himself.

Everyone should take the test, memory savant or not.

"We set the bar at a million users," Dellis says. "The numbers [of great memorizers] will be small, which is why they set the bar so high."

Most of what Dellis does has an edge of quest to it, for mind and body. You and I might rest on the laurels of being a memory champion. Nelson was part of starting a whole new memory league. You and I might hike to relax. Dellis started Climb for Memory, which raises money for Alzheimer's research. Since 2008, Dellis has climbed Rainier, Denali, Mont Blanc, Everest South (twice) and North (once), Alpamayo, Kilimanjaro, Cotopaxi and Huantsan.

"I think there is a very common thread in both [memorizing and climbing] and that is the mental side of it," Dellis says. "Climbing is such a mental game ... it comes down to focus, which is what I do in these speed tests of memory. I have to block out every voice that pops in my brain that wants to think about this or that."

The point being that he has trained himself to do these extreme things and his budding YouTube channel offers lessons and examples for the rest of us, from the practical (how to remember names and faces) to the athletic (remembering a deck of cards underwater).

Dellis took on the very different kind of extreme sport in YouTube vlogging, partially, to help spread the word for the challenge, but also to meet another goal of his own. Alongside the drive to push himself is a desire to help others. But building a YouTube audience is no easy feat, especially now. With thousands of creators who have millions of subscribers, Dellis realized he didn't need to perfect his vlogger game, he needed to start it.

"I've been meaning to do it but I always have these grand ideas," he says, "and I kept waiting until I had this tool or this skill to make an animation or whatever. Then I just thought, I don't have any videos up and this is so stupid. I should just do what I do and make something. And the content will speak for itself."